About Wanderings

Each week I will post my current syndicated newspaper column that focuses upon social issues, the media, pop culture and whatever might be interesting that week. During the week, I'll also post comments (a few words to a few paragraphs) about issues in the news. These are informal postings. Check out http://www.facebook.com/walterbrasch And, please go to http://www.greeleyandstone.com/ to learn about my latest book.

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Environmental Justice: One Illegal Bid at a Time

On April 21, the day before Earth Day, Tim
DeChristopher was released from custody by the Department of Justice. He had served
21 months for having committed an act of civil disobedience against a
government bureau that had violated the law.

In his mid-20s, DeChristopher, who graduated
from high school in Pittsburgh, was in Utah to work as a wilderness guide with
at-risk and troubled youth.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), in the
last month of the George W. Bush presidency (December 2008), decided to auction
149,000 acres of public land in southern Utah; most of the land was near national
parks. Big Energy was there to scoop up what it could at bargain basement
prices in order to drill for gas and oil. Environmentalists protested, and
filed suits to block the sale, but didn’t have the money to outbid the gas and
oil companies.

DeChristopher, an economics student at the
University of Utah, didn’t have the money, either. But, on a spontaneous
decision after he entered the auction, he got a paddle and bidder number 70.
After watching energy companies take parcel after parcel of pristine land at
prices as low as $40 an acre, he bid on parcels to inflate the price,
eventually winning bids on 14 of those parcels, totaling 22,500 acres. His
winning bids, about $1.7 million, would have given him prime federal land for
about $77 an acre.

His actions voided the auction, but
succeeded in holding up the sale until a federal court the following month
issued a temporary injunction, ruling that the BLM violated federal environmental
and historic protection laws. A month later, the Obama administration revoked
the sale of 77 parcels totaling more than 100,000 acres. The sale price of
those parcels averaged about $60 an acre. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said
the Department had “rushed ahead to sell oil and gas leases at the doorstep of some of our
greatest national icons, some of our nation’s most treasured landscapes.”

Although DeChristopher and hundreds of
thousands of activists succeeded in reversing the BLM sale and kept the land
from being carved up by drillers, they didn’t succeed in obtaining justice. The
federal government continued its pursuit of DeChristopher who now increased his
activism, further enraging the prosecution. In April 2009, four months after
the auction, he was indicted for fraud and violation of the Federal Onshore Oil
and Gas Leasing Reform Act.

On the night before his trial at the end of
February 2011, hundreds gathered at the First Unitarian Church.

Four days later, after nine postponements
requested by the Department of Justice, DeChristopher was convicted. The court
had refused to allow the defense to present evidence that the auction was
illegal or that other successful bidders reneged on their commitments and
were not prosecuted. “The
injustice in this case wasn’t that I was facing a trial,” said DeChristopher,
“It’s that the jury was denied the information to decide if my actions were
justified.”

During
the next four months, the Department of Justice ran an extensive investigation
on DeChristopher, and recommended he be sentenced to probation, with no jail
time. DeChristopher and his attorneys had previously rejected a plea bargain
that would have given him a 30-day jail sentence and probation.

However,
Judge Dee Benson disregarded the Department of Justice recommendation, and
ordered DeChristopher to pay a $10,000 fine and serve a two year
sentence.

During the trial, the prosecutor had argued that DeChristopher
could have halted the auction in other peaceful ways or that he could have
appealed the awarding of land. During the sentencing hearing, DeChristopher
pointed out, “it had become common practice for the BLM to take volunteers from
the oil and gas industry to process those permits [for land]. The oil industry
was paying people specifically to volunteer for the industry that was supposed
to be regulating it, and it was to those industry staff that I would have been
appealing.”

He also referred to a New York Times investigation that, said DeChristopher, revealed
“a major scandal involving Department of the Interior regulators who were
taking bribes of sex and drugs from the oil companies that they were supposed
to be regulating. In 2008, this was the condition of the rule of law, for
which Mr. Huber [the federal prosecutor] says I lacked respect.”

Judge
Benson openly acknowledged, “The offense itself, with all apologies to people actually in
the auction itself, wasn’t that bad,” and stated he might not have imposed a
prison sentence—but that DeChristopher’s “continuing trail of statements” and
activism following his arrest was not acceptable. Thus, a federal court ruled
that exercising a First Amendment right was a factor in sentencing, a decision
the Appeals court later affirmed on technicalities.

Within two
hours of sentencing, several dozen people in Salt Lake City protested, linking
themselves together and blocking traffic. Police arrested 26, according to the Salt Lake City Tribune. Dozens of peaceful
demonstrations occurred at federal courthouses throughout the country, the
people energized and angry that the government pursued charges against an
activist who had help prove the auction he had stopped was illegal.

Robert
Redford, actor/director and environmental activist, summed up the hypocrisy of
the prosecution: “He just did what he thought was his constitutional right. In
the meantime we have all these guys on Wall Street sending this country into
the tank. And no one’s going to jail. No one’s even being brought to justice.”

Not long after his arrest, DeChristopher
formed Peaceful Upraising, an organization devoted to protecting the
environment.

In September, DeChristopher will enter the
Harvard Divinity School on a full scholarship; after three years of study, he
will earn a master of divinity degree, with the intent to be ordained as a
Unitarian minister.

On
Earth Day this year, the day after DeChristopher was released, among thousands
of activities throughout the world, 50 venues broadcast Bidder 70, a compelling 73-minute documentary by Beth and George
Gage. They had spent three years researching and producing the story of a man
who helped uncover illegal activities by the government, yet was imprisoned.
Henry David Thoreau, who had been jailed for refusing to pay taxes that
supported the illegal Mexican–American War, 1846–1848 (known by Mexicans as the
American Invasion) would be proud.

[Walter Brasch is an award-winning
journalist, whose latest book is Fracking Pennsylvania, an
overview of the environmental, health, worker safety effects of fracking, and which peels away the industry
claims of the economic benefits.]

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My latest Book. Available in Print. Updated ebook coming soon!

"Fracking Pennsylvania is a fact-based overview of the issues surrounding the natural gas industry and fracking. Although it focuses upon the Marcellus Shale, it looks at cases and issues in other parts of the country. The book is not meant to be a comprehensive analysis of the science and engineering of the process to extract natural gas nor an extensive discussion of the economic, health, environmental, and political issues. It is meant as a basic reference to acquaint people with the issues, with the hope they will dig deeper into areas that directly concern them and rally their friends and neighbors to help protect the health and environment of the people, wildlife, and natural vegetation."

About Me

Walter M. Brasch. I'm a journalist, a writer who looks at society and tries to
understand, then analyze and explain its many complex parts as they
relate to each other to help people better understand their own lives
and what's both necessary and important to their lives.
My weekly column appears in 30+ print newspapers and several dozen
online newspapers. I also write books, often fusing social issues and
history.
I was a newspaper and magazine reporter and editor, and a
writer-producer for multi-screen multimedia productions. I also retired
as a professor of mass communications.